Therapeutic Brain Interventions in Mood Disorders and the Nature of Emotion

The introduction of convulsive therapy (ECT) in the 1930s and psychotropic medications in the 1950s changed the face of therapeutics in psychiatry. Before the development of these somatic treatments, the predominant view was that the major forms of psychopathology reflected irreversible structural degeneration of the brain and that little could be done to ameliorate symptoms. The discovery of effective somatic therapies did more than undo this therapeutic nihilism. It provided fertile ground for oncological refinement and for the generation of hypotheses regarding the mechanisms of action of the treatments and the underlying pathophysiology of specific disorders (Fink, l979; Klein et al., 1980).